Hi Caroline,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 1: I’m equally interested in pretty much everything but not especially committed to any one interest .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were benevolence, achievement, and security.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was conscientiousness.
You said your top three talents were verbal, kinesthetic, and analytic.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you were not sure yet about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to happiness .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said LBO .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Good grade .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said lack of time .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I get home from class, I will read the textbook .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Sports .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Upset when receiving critical feedback, and Upset when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling nearly an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel Happy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Metaphors have psychological force |
| exploration before exploitation |
| Therapy helps |
| Harmony is aerodynamic |
| WOOP! |
| Getting good at anything depends on more than innate skill |
| Embrace discomfort |
| Fail better! |
| Importance of self control |
| Mentors should be authoritative |
| Five minute favor |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Krutin Devesh |
| Caroline, thank you for being a very helpful and positive team member this semester. I can tell you had an incredibly busy semester, but it was great to see you always bring a positive energy to our group discussions even amidst the continuous cycle of LBOs you had to do. I appreciate you always looking out for others in the group – from picking up our name tents and candy on the first day to making sure we check in on each other, it was great working alongside you. It was great hearing what you were up to on a given week, and I enjoyed seeing your gamesmanship on display in tic-tac-toe and hangman.
I enjoyed hearing that your discovery project stemmed from your competitive family games. I still remember the days when you thought running was the way you wanted to go with the project, and I’m glad you chose to go the route of poker since I learned a lot from your presentation. I resonated with the competitive nature of wanting to win games, and as someone trying to get more into poker. Thank you for teaching me the difference between loose and aggressive strategies, and how to properly play them!
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| Adam Tannenbaum |
| I knew Caroline mildly before this semester began, but I am so grateful for the opportunity this semester gave me to get to who she is as a person. She is a brilliant individual who has deep values she genuinely cares about as well as a hard working mentality she harnesses to drive towards achievement. She has a very positive energy about her, cares about her friends, and gives support to them. I really appreciated that energy over the course of the semester. Getting to know her personality a lot more through our pair and shares as well as weekly group debriefs was a great experience.
Caroline did her discovery project on poker. Personally, I enjoy playing poker with friends as well as competitively so hearing about her journey was intriguing. Getting to speak with some of the top poker experts like she did and get advise from them on how to be successful in the game was so cool and educational. Learning to judge the game using probabilities is a skill very few players beginner players use, which is surprising since thats the basis the game is built on. I hope what she was able to learn lets her compete better with her family as well as wherever else she plays. |
| Eileen Wang |
| Caroline always brought calm and genuine energy to the group. The combination of her astuteness in conversation and warmth towards others helped our group connect and become more than a run-of-the-mill class team. Caroline definitely embodies someone with grit - she’s passionate and enthusiastic while being driven and persevering. I enjoyed being a part of Caroline’s team and am positive that she will be successful in anything she pursues.
As someone who is quite bad at poker and only shallowly familiar with the game, I quite enjoyed seeing what goes into being a competitive poker player. I was particularly intrigued by the math and statistics that rule the game and found the matrices useful for thinking about the benefit of having different hands. I thought Caroline did a great job of presenting her findings, and the outcome of her curiosity conversation has reinforced the benefit of having such conversations for my own endeavors. Good luck to Caroline in beating her dad in poker– I’m rooting for her!
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.